As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (20 page)

“He’s charming,” I explained, my answer matter-of-fact. “He got it from our mother.”

“Damn Aunt Ada,” Nina said, sighing. “Did you ever hear the story of what she did to my mother?”

Of course I had. The story even had a name: “Poor Vivie.” I’d heard it more than once—but never from my mother.

Several lightning bugs lit up simultaneously and we three cried out, momentarily startled. Davy grabbed at the air but didn’t catch any.

Soon enough we were back to darkness.

“I think you’re charming,” I said, speaking into the night.

“Oh, Molly. You really think that helps?” Nina said.

The next morning at breakfast all the news was that my parents and aunt and uncle had danced like mad. Had Leo, so frail and cerebral, really danced? we asked. Even Nina couldn’t see it, but Vivie assured us that indeed he had. Vivie, clearly uplifted by the fun of the night before, had made oatmeal, which she urged us to garnish not just with sugar but with a mix of cinnamon and sugar, and we could add raisins and dried apricots too if we liked. “Try something new,” she said. She’d also made cinnamon-spiced muffins. “Get ’em while they’re hot,” she told us, in the charged voice of a saleslady, an odd tone for her. She uttered the phrase again as she set another platter of the muffins on the table in the dining room where my father and Leo ate, our “kids’ table” too crowded for them.

Howard finally came downstairs. Oddly, this Sunday he split his time between the kitchen table, where he ate a bowl of oatmeal, and the men’s table, where he devoured three muffins. Upon leaving us for the dining room he announced, “I’m a wandering Jew,” and then he wandered from one room to the next.

“Don’t go too far,” Nina called, “or you’ll find yourself in trouble.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Howard asked. He’d returned to the doorway between the rooms.

“Just that you’d better watch it,” Nina said. She smirked as she stirred her oatmeal. “We know something, Howard.”

Howard laughed. When the sisters weren’t looking, he pursed his lips as if to kiss. “All that reading, Nina,” he taunted, “and you don’t know a thing.”

“Howard, I heard that,” Vivie interjected sternly.

“Doesn’t matter,” Nina said. She smiled at her mother then glared at Howard. “I really do know something,” she told him. “Don’t push me, Howard. I know something big,” she said.

That weekend, my father had brought to Woodmont the next installment of the picture Davy and Lucinda Rossetti were drawing together. Rather than mail it again, Mrs. Rossetti had dropped the drawing off at the store. But by then the picture was a mere chore to Davy, and just as he would have done had school been in session, he waited until the last minutes of that Sunday afternoon to open the envelope. He looked at the page from every angle before shrugging in surrender. “Here goes nothing,” he mumbled, and then lengthened and fattened each of the tubes of brown, gray, and blue emerging from the picture’s red base.

“Want me to ask Mrs. Rossetti for a hint?” Mort said, his palm affectionately encasing the top of Davy’s head. Before he left, Mort bent low for a kiss, which Davy delivered on his cheek.

“I can do it myself,” Davy answered with a weariness that suggested otherwise.

Davy’s heaviness of heart must have touched our father, for he whisked Davy up. “It can’t be that bad,” he told him.

“Homework,”
Davy complained into Mort’s chest.

“Homework,” Mort repeated, his voice as grave as Davy’s. “That’s the end of the world. No question. The very end of it.”

He lifted Davy’s face and smiled. “You’re a father’s joy,” he said, which left Davy, once he was back on his feet, silent and nodding—his way of telling Mort that he loved him, too.

The men’s departure began the start of our fifth week in Woodmont, a time when Howard went back to Middletown, as he had the summer before, to help with the store’s semiannual inventory check.

Bec, who hadn’t sewn anything since she’d successfully delivered Mrs. Coventry’s dress, was anxious to begin another project, though this time she planned to sew something for each of us. In years past she’d been the one to decide what she’d make, but Monday night over supper she asked Vivie and Ada to tell her what they wanted. “I’ll make you anything. You name it. I’ll make you the dress of your dreams,” she announced to her sisters, turning from one to the other, then rushing at both of them, pulling each into a strange, desperate hug. Only she knew that with her decision to go to New York she was preparing to leave them. “You’ve both done so much for me,” she said, by way of explanation.

“It’s not like you haven’t done a thing or two for us,” Ada responded, taken aback by the emotional outburst but clearly flattered by it also. Or perhaps it was the idea of the dress of her dreams that pleased my mother so, because the next moment she was patting her pinned-up hair, a gesture that signaled she was feeling the full extent of her beauty, and she told Bec, “Let me just put up a fresh pot of coffee and we’ll get at it. Burgundy, Bec. I just can’t get that burgundy of Mrs. Coventry’s fabric out of my mind.”

Bec was willing to make me the dress of my dreams as well, but I didn’t dream of dresses and had no response for her for several days. It was already Thursday of that fifth week when I told my friends Melissa Bornstein and Anna Weiss about Bec’s offer, and then I described for them the dress that Bec had made for Nina. What did they think about that kind of thing for me? I asked. By way of answering we decided to find the dress, which meant leaving the beach and wandering up our cottage’s front steps, where we walked past Nina, who was on the porch finishing the last chapters of that Lincoln biography. “Hey,” we each called to Nina, who waved to us and murmured a responsive “hey” without even looking up.

We filed into the upstairs bedroom and I pulled from the closet the strapless dress and matching jacket. Holding the dress before my friends, I explained to them that the upper half had fallen down when I’d tried it on earlier that summer, but that didn’t stop them from wanting to see it on me anyway.

This time I knew to hold the dress up, but it fell down again when Melissa grabbed the jacket from my grip and I let go of the dress to grab the jacket back. But before I could, she’d wriggled into it. The yellow background with cream-colored flowers looked ridiculous over her striped bathing suit with its little skirt, but she didn’t seem to notice as she stared in the mirror. “Can I?” she asked, pointing to the dress at my feet, and I assented by stepping out of the way.

“My turn,” Anna soon said. She was on the chunky side, which made for a struggle with the zipper, but as long as she sucked everything in and didn’t breathe, we could pull it up. Pleased with how she looked, she paced across the room, modeling.

“What are you doing?” Nina asked. She was suddenly standing in front of Anna. Startled by Nina’s presence, Anna jumped back as if this upstairs Nina were a ghost of the one we’d passed on the porch.

“But you won’t wear it,” I told Nina.

“It’s mine. She made it for me,” Nina insisted with a possessiveness that didn’t square with the neglect she’d shown all summer toward the dress. To my surprise she grabbed Anna’s shoulders, forcibly turned her, and yanked the back zipper down. Anna’s body, already squeezed tight inside the dress, burst from it, and she stood there, shocked, nearly naked. Nina pointed to the puddle of the dress that circled Anna’s bare feet. “Mine,” she said.

After that I didn’t want a dress and told Bec so. This was the next day, Friday, and Bec was just readying herself for her weekly solitary walk. I didn’t know the dress had meant that much to Nina, I explained to Bec, but it clearly did.

“Can I walk with you?” I asked Bec, feeling low about the incident with my friends and even lower that I’d disappointed Nina.

“Not today,” Bec said, and then she pulled me into a hug, as urgent as the embraces she’d offered Ada and Vivie earlier that week. “I really think the world of you, Molly,” she told me, though I had no idea why. “I just want you to know that.”

It turned out Bec wasn’t the only one acting odd that day. Davy was back to playing with our puppets, but instead of Samson Bagel’s usual heroic exploits, Davy had him beside Vivie in the kitchen, narrating in a voice very much like our mother’s as Vivie mixed eggs in a bowl, preparing to make her first soufflé. And, as if she and Davy had exchanged roles, my mother was on the beach, playing—not cards with the adult women but hopscotch with my friends Melissa and Anna, who clapped as my mother made a series of wobbly but successful one-legged leaps. Nina’s behavior was the most out of character: she was in the back bedroom rather than at her usual reading spot on the porch. Seated at her mother’s vanity, she had her hair twisted and pinned in a style I’d never seen her wear before. For a while I sat on the bed, watching.

“You know what Howard would say about this?” she asked me. Her hair was styled like Bec’s, pinned high and worked into an interesting, complicated twist. “He’d say, ‘You think you know something? Something about
fun?
’ Then he’d laugh. I hate his laugh.” She laughed then, in just the way she hated. “Molly,” she asked, “why does he always laugh?”

“He’s not here,” I reminded her, though her imitation of him, especially of his laugh, was so true that I could practically see him in the doorway.

But any sense of him disappeared when Nina said, “Right, Molly. So simple. He isn’t here.”

She secured the new hair twist with several more pins and then smiled widely, beautifully. She turned to me. “He isn’t here!” she said.

But it was Friday and the men, including Howard, returned. This was at about five or so, and when Mort entered the house this time no pots were going on the stove, no dishes were set on the table, nor were there challah loaves placed there, because the very idea of them hadn’t yet crossed anyone’s mind that day. Nor had anyone thought to dust or vacuum, and in the living room Nina’s and my sofa bed was still unfolded. All of us, in our way, had had a grand day.

“What difference does it make?” Ada argued to Mort once he’d pulled her from the beach. “We can always light the candles and say the blessings. We don’t need a meal to do that. Can’t we have an easy summer, Mort? Can’t we all have a little fun?”

“What are you asking for, Ada—a whole summer of seventh days?” Mort paced between the kitchen and the dining room, staring stupefied into each. “Look,” he added, “I don’t make the rules. God does.”

“Well, sir,” Ada said as she thrust her balled hands into the pockets of her housedress. “You’re going to have to bargain with
me
one of these days. This is
my
cottage.
My
home.”

“Ada, come on now. We can’t break the rules,” Mort argued, his voice stern. “We live by the law. That’s our job as Jews. That’s what
makes
us Jews.”

By this time everyone had gathered in the dining room.

“Law?” Ada said. Her tone was piqued, her voice quavering. “Here’s your law,” she asserted. Without looking into a mirror she yanked her mass of hair into a tidy knot. Then she grabbed her black pocketbook, which sat on the table with the telephone on it, pulled a tube of lipstick from it, and smeared the red coloring on her face so that she looked more like a clown than anything else. She stood tall in her wedge sandals as she turned to face Mort. She smiled at him. “Like your law?” she asked, crossing her arms over her loose housedress. Then she pulled the kiddush cup from a cabinet, along with wine, and filled the cup. “Good Shabbos,” she told my father, holding the cup high before she tipped it, pouring the wine down her throat in one long sip. “Good law,” she said, before she smacked her lips. She was shouting when she reached for the bottle again. “Hell, more law! More law!” she said.

Mort left.

He walked through the living room, making his way around the open sofa bed, and stood on the porch, staring at the ocean and at the back of the Isaacsons’ cottage.

Ada stood in the dining room with her hand over her mouth. When she finally dropped it she said to Nina and me, her words repentant, anxious, “Come, girls, let’s clean this house. Come on.
Shnel, shnel.
”

T
hat summer, like all the years before, Nelson stayed in Middletown on weekends. Friday afternoons Mort and Leo would head off to Woodmont, but Nelson knew, even if the others were too polite to say it, that there was no room for him there. “You’re always invited,” Ada had told him years ago and had reiterated any number of times, but the truth was that should he ever have taken her up on the offer the entire configuration in the cottage would have been upset. He knew perfectly well there wasn’t a bed to spare, that Bec, single like him, was put out to pasture on the screened porch. Where would they put him? On the roof? Moreover, what would he do there? He’d grown too fat to be anything but embarrassed at the thought of sitting in bathing trunks in the sun. And, apart from Howard, he rarely engaged with the children; he knew we took notice of him only for his ready supply of Tootsie Rolls. His brother and Leo would be involved with their wives, their children. And the women—Ada, Vivie, and Bec—who, for their high spirits and easy laughter, he would have liked to talk to the most, well, God only knew how to spend a weekend talking to women.

So the summer was a little quiet, a little lonely, but the first week in August—the week preceding my parents’ Shabbos fight—Mort had brought Howard back to Middletown for a week to help out with end-of-summer inventory, and Nelson felt a surprising sense of relief at the sight of his nephew. “Hey, hey, hey,” Nelson had called out when Howard first walked through the store’s front doors. “Who’s this big guy? Joe DiMaggio?” he asked, swinging his arms as if holding a bat. “Uncle!” Howard had cried in surprise as if he were as thrilled to see Nelson as Nelson was to see him.

Though Howard was full-grown it seemed to Nelson he’d gained substantial height in the weeks since he’d last seen him. Certainly he’d grown tan, and there he was, taller than ever, extraordinarily handsome, flashing a brilliant smile, with skin a golden brown that matched the stripes in his tie. The boy threw his arms around Nelson’s shoulders. “How are you, Uncle?” he asked.

“Fine, fine,” Nelson said. “You looking good there,” he added, nodding.

The rest of the men in the store gathered round.

“It’s the sailing,” Howard said.

“Sailing. Sure, sure. Wind’s been your friend,” Nelson muttered, admiring his nephew’s vitality. “Sun’s been your friend, too.”

“But this week you stay the hell
inside,
” Mort said, leaning to slap Howard’s back affectionately. Nelson and Kurt Hanson, the new employee, rocked with a quick burst of laughter. Even Leo, typically dour, smiled. Yes, Nelson thought, that’s what work was: not a week in the sun but a week inside the store, and didn’t they know it. He found himself hoping that a week of inventory wouldn’t cost Howard too much of his tan. The kid had a right to his good looks. He was young.

Inventory was a dogged, tiring business, and that’s why Howard had been dragged back from the rocky shores of Woodmont to Main Street in Middletown to help. They had to negotiate the creaky steps leading to the basement to open any remaining boxes there, checking and counting their contents, deciding if anything was worth the schlep upstairs: pairs of socks and stacks of men’s ties, boxes of stationery and greeting cards, a few women’s hats; they sold it all at Leibritsky’s Department Store. They had to go through every item on the floor and compare it to their records. They had to pull item after item off the main racks or shelves and place them onto sales racks or shelves, or into the basement for another season. To be prepared for fall, they had to reorganize the menswear, the women’s wear, and the children’s wear. Out with the old; in with the new. They had to reconfigure the kitchen appliances and stack the newest gems—more of the Waring blenders and Sunbeam’s Mixmaster—where they couldn’t be missed. Thanks to a soft spot Mort had for selling shoes, Leibritsky’s had developed a reputation in this department, especially for its practical, all-purpose shoes, the kind with thick soles and heavy laces, the kind that stretched a dollar, and this required going up and down every row of shoe boxes, accounting for each box’s contents. They had more than a few pair of men’s shoes from 1940 that had never sold, several women’s from 1942, ’43, and ’44. The wartime rationing of those later years had something to do with the unsold stock, Nelson knew. It was late in the day on Tuesday by the time they got to those and Howard looked up, astonished.

“This is nuts. We’re well into nineteen forty-eight,” Howard pleaded to Nelson.

“Keep them,” Nelson answered, briefly glancing around to see that neither Mort nor Leo had heard him. They, too, would think having such old inventory nuts. Then again, Nelson realized, what did it matter what they thought? After all, Nelson was the one with the MBA, and from Harvard no less,
Harvard.
They wouldn’t dare contradict him even when his advice was so stupid a teenager’s instincts immediately told him so.

“Not so nuts,” Nelson stubbornly insisted to Howard. “There are people who like what they already know. They’ll sell eventually. Trust me.” And of course Howard did. Indeed, Howard nodded with appreciation as if he’d just been taught a wise lesson, not from uncle to nephew but from master to apprentice, professor to student. Absentminded nut, Nelson then admitted to himself, patting the box from 1940.

Yet a pair of the dated shoes did sell, the next day, a Wednesday. Midafternoon, the heat from the street wafting in, causing them all to slow down, to drop themselves into any one of the chairs strewn about the store, and Giorgio D’Almato trundled in, looking like he might fall down from fatigue or imbalance—he was eighty-seven and refused a cane. Nelson and Howard were still at the wall of shoes, the Wailing Wall, they had taken to calling it just that morning, and they had each written a favorite joke on a scrap of paper, folded the scrap tightly, then slipped it in a space between the boxes of shoes the way printed prayers were tucked around the stones of the sacred wall in Old Jerusalem. Howard, laughing, had davened for good measure.

“Let’s not get crazy, you know?” Nelson had urged. “It’s a tough business over there. Tough going. A little fun, that’s all. A little fun.”

But so far that week every moment around Howard had seemed exceptionally fun, whether they were overtly joking or simply engaged in everyday tasks. And that’s why, perhaps, as Giorgio D’Almato slowly approached, Nelson found himself opening his arms wide and calling out in a welcoming tone he didn’t even know he had, “Mr. D’Almato, sir. What do you say, young man, what do you say?”

When what the old man said was “Something practical, size nine, why ask, don’t you know?” Nelson, winking Howard’s way, turned toward the wall and pulled from it the unsold shoes from 1940. Old man D’Almato leaned his face toward the open box, scrutinized the contents, sniffed the leather, and gave a quick nod of assent. Nelson held Mr. D’Almato’s arm as he lowered himself to sit in a nearby chair. With a nod toward Howard, Nelson watched as Howard helped relieve the man of his worn shoes, the soles cracked, the laces nearly gone. He had bought them here, Nelson knew, probably some ten years ago. Indeed, everyone in the D’Almato family bought at Leibritsky’s Department Store and the Leibritsky men, in turn, got their hair cut at the D’Almato barbershop. If you were good to people, Nelson knew, the people of those people were good to you. This was the first rule of business, absolutely, and do you think even one knucklehead at Harvard had ever heard of it? A shoehorn at one heel, then the other, Howard eased the man’s feet into the new shoes. Howard practically lifted the man upright so he could take a turn in the new pair. Old man D’Almato liked them. He rubbed his palms together and mumbled to himself. Nelson smiled.

Once the shoes were purchased—at a spontaneous and decent discount—Nelson told his customer, “Let me get Mort. He’ll be sorry not to have said hello.”

The man nodded. This, too, was a rule of business, the greeting from the eldest brother. And Giorgio D’Almato, like everybody else, knew the rules. He waited.

Thursday morning, the inventory still under way, Nelson felt sorry that the time with Howard, a particularly congenial thing, would soon end. But the weekend was coming. He’d be staying; they’d be going. As if reading his thoughts, Mort patted Nelson’s shoulder, telling him, “Look, you’re doing a nice job here. Nice job. Howard’s enjoying it. He likes your company. Always has.”

A little boost was what his brother’s remarks gave him, a boost of energy, a boost of confidence, and when he found his nephew a few minutes later sitting by the new display of kitchen appliances, clearly bored, fingering the Sunbeam Mixmaster, Nelson motioned to him. Howard rose and followed Nelson into the basement.

“Look, there’s some old things in the back, see, and nobody will be the wiser if we just let them go. Maybe we can find you something. You never know, maybe you need a new shirt, something like that. A boy heading off to college like you are. A new tie, maybe,” Nelson urged.

“A new tie, circa what, Uncle—nineteen twenty-eight?” Howard smiled. “’Twenty-eight. Was it a good year, Uncle?”

Nelson glanced at Howard, who was laughing, and the two walked toward the several large boxes pushed against a back wall which Nelson had discovered earlier that summer and, to save face, had kept out of the inventory.

“Some wisecracker,” Nelson said, opening one of the boxes. Inside were the men’s shirts from the summer before, short-sleeved, cotton. Though the box was covered with dust, the shirts inside were pristine, still wrapped in their original packaging. “Forgot about these one year and they’ve been hiding here ever since. But the time has come,” Nelson announced, pulling out several and handing them to Howard. “Yes?”

“This store is a crazy mess!” Howard kicked the box as he grabbed the packages and studied them. Like Giorgio D’Almato the day before, Howard soon began happily mumbling.

Now was no time to play a record, but it was a good time for a sit, and Nelson dragged his rocker toward Howard and watched as the boy continued to fish through the box. “Five too many?” Howard asked.

“Whatever you need.” Nelson pulled a Tootsie Roll from his pocket. He threw one to Howard and the two silently chewed under the weak glow of the basement’s lights. It was warm down here, Nelson reflected, rocking forward and back, but not so bad. Relaxing, he heaved a tired sigh. “Long week,” he said.

Howard nodded and continued chewing. He held his new shirts in one hand as he might notebooks for school. Upon swallowing, he cleared his throat.

“Uncle?” His voice was quieter than before, tentative.

Nelson stopped rocking. He waited for Howard to go on, but the boy said nothing, his posture suddenly tense. Nelson reached to pull another chocolate from his pocket for Howard, but Howard shook his head no. A silent moment followed, at least between the two of them. Above, the floors persistently creaked.

“I really can’t tell anyone,” Howard began. “You know, anyone down there.”

Nelson realized soon enough that the boy was speaking of Woodmont.

Down there.
The place he never went.

“There’s this girl,” Howard finally began, and because his tone of voice was unusually earnest, it took Nelson back to a collage of moments sitting beside a much younger Howard at Middletown’s Palace Theater. Before each movie Howard would stare entranced at the blank screen, curtain still down, as if the show were already under way. Finally he’d turn to Nelson and beseech him in a voice not so different from the one he’d just heard, “Will it start soon?” “Soon, soon,” Nelson would answer, and then he’d pass Howard a candy, and, feeling good, like a father, he’d cup the top of Howard’s head then give the kid a pat.

Yes, there was a girl, Howard repeated, and he was pretty sure she was the one.

Green eyes, a lot of freckles, a big smile, though she was often serious, and with each detail Nelson nodded, until Howard paused, suddenly somber, and then said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Forget it, Uncle.”

The words made Nelson self-conscious, as if they implied that a man like him knew nothing about love.
But Howard,
he longed to say in response,
I wasn’t always this fat.

He’d been a handsome kid himself, shorter than Howard, but good-looking in his own way, a wide face, a soft smile, a little shyness that wore off once people got to know him. Back then, when he was Howard’s age, people did take the time to know him. Before Harvard he’d gone to Boston University—his father insisted that he and Mort get their college educations, this was America after all, this was what it was all about, what all the saving and scrimping was for. But Mort had been pulled from college after only a year and a half—the store was too much for just the old man—and it was consequently left to Nelson to do the learning for them all. He’d studied history, just like Mort did before he left, just like his father told him to, and in the course of things he’d met Mimmie Klein, up in Boston from New London, Connecticut.
Mimmie Klein,
Nelson almost said out loud to Howard.

“Tell you what,” he said instead when he finally did interrupt his nephew. “We can’t stay in this basement forever. Time to get back to it. But let’s have dinner tonight, me and you. Then you can tell me the whole story. I do want to hear. The one? Is that what you said, Howard?”

Howard’s expression remained grim. He nodded.

Nelson had risen from his rocker and had begun to climb the basement stairs when he turned back to Howard, behind him. “What’d you say her name was?” Nelson asked.

“Didn’t say.”

“No name? Howard, the girl for you has no name?”

Howard said, “Uncle, come on now. This is private business. We’ll talk about that later.”

They were seated in a booth at the Garden Restaurant, on the corner of Main and Washington, he and Howard waiting for their orders of hamburgers to arrive, Howard somewhat agitated, picking at his napkin, glancing about the place as if he’d never been there before, and Nelson felt it again, the old urge to pat the kid on the head, tell him, “Soon, soon.” Instead he broached the subject of the girl again, the as yet unnamed girl, and Howard sighed. “Let’s eat first,” he suggested, and Nelson, though curious, nodded.